Time machine back up and MBA

New 13" MBA. Love it, but having trouble with my time machine back up to my 1 TB Le Cie external hard drive. The USB connection to the drive is too slow, making back up a problem. Thoughts?? Do they have drives with Thunderbolt connections? Appreciate the feedback.

24 hours is way too long. Even for the initial backup. Shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. I would take a look at the external drive and see what is happening. I'd go to TM preferences and remove the disk as the backup disk and then add it back in, then restart TM.

It's also possible that the time estimate is incorrect. Sometimes it will report a time way longer than it will actually take, but settle to a (more or less) accurate time once things are well underway.

For example, I cloned 3.5TB of data from one of my RAIDs to another just last night. When I started the clone (via Disk Utility's 'restore' option) it said 7 days to complete. Yes, 7 days. When I came back about an hour and a half later, it said 11 hours. That was at 12:30 am. When I awoke at 6:30 am, it was completely finished, including the whole verification stage (where the whole 3.5TB of data is re-read for integrity).

Let it start and run it over night. I bet it finishes far sooner.

One last piece of advice. Make sure you've got a known-good USB cable. A crappy cable might drop you down to USB 1.1 speeds - which really could take 24 hours.

If it really takes that long, there's something wrong with your target drive.

Agreed 100%. Time Machine restore of 150GB to my Macbook Air (transferring stuff from my MBP13) took a couple hours, maybe 2.5 or so. Heck, doing the first TM backup over wifi from my Macbook Air to a NAS on my LAN took less than 10 hours to finish (let it run overnight).

If 120GB takes more than three or four hours to a USB drive, than something is VERY wrong with the drive or cable.

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